Paul Briggs says the Rumbalara Football Club aims to provide hope for the future, and a sense of the past, for Shepparton's Indigenous youth. (ABC Goulburn Murray:Nick Fogarty)

On an inside wall of Shepparton's Rumbalara Football Netball Club rooms is a giant mural depicting the creator spirit, Baiame, and the Rainbow Serpent, who made the Murray River.

Surrounding the mural are hundreds of photographs of the local Indigenous community, including famous leader and Yorta Yorta man, Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls, and figures from as far back as the 1800s.

At a table a few metres away from the mural, two young men on secondment from a Melbourne consulting firm tap away on laptops as they organise the annual Dungala Kaiela or 'Defining Shepparton' Oration.

They're doing so under the watchful eye of the Kaiela Institute's executive director - and Rumbalara's founding President - Paul Briggs, a man with a strong grasp on both the past and the future of the club and the Indigenous community it represents.

Life's work

Mr Briggs grew up on Cummeragunja Reserve, on the Murray River in southern New South Wales, and moved to Melbourne to work in Aboriginal legal aid after leaving school.

He spent much of the 1970s working and playing suburban football with future Australian of the Year, Mick Dodson, and his brother Pat, who was also destined to be an Aboriginal leader.

Mr Briggs knew the importance of football in creating social cohesion, so he set about forming a club where both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people were welcomed.

While they struggled for many years to find a league that would accept them, Mr Briggs says the club now plays a key role in providing social and employment opportunities for young Indigenous people.

"We've had to deal with the social stereotypes and relationships and fears that people have of what might be termed the 'Aboriginal persona' or brand," he says.

"I would say that people were quite nervous, from a business sense, about aligning themselves with Aboriginal community...and I think it's taken us at least 15 years to build a sense of trust that it's a safe thing to do."

Three years ago it was impossible to get a young Aboriginal person a job in a local supermarket, Mr Briggs says, but partnerships between business and the football club have changed this.

He says in the last three years around 70 Aboriginal youth - particularly girls - have been engaged in school-to-work programs across Shepparton and Echuca.

New leadership

It's this kind of work - bridging the 'silos' of government, business and community - that led to a group of Mr Briggs' peers rallying around him to form the Fellowship for Indigenous Leadership in 2003.

The Fellowship helped to fund his work and now funds similar work of more than a dozen emerging Indigenous leaders around Victoria.

Douglas Nicholls' great-grandson, former Essendon footballer Nathan Lovett-Murray, was one of the program's Emerging Leaders in 2011-12 and is playing with Rumbalara for the 2014 season.

Mr Briggs hopes the fellowship will allow young leaders to pursue ideas that would be difficult to achieve if they were relying on government salary or funding.

"Aboriginal leadership has predominantly been isolated to the discussions with politicians and bureaucrats around the poverty of Aboriginal people," he says.

"It's been narrowly built around what might be the political opportunities that might present themselves.

"In the past decade we've worked really hard to bring a broader section of leadership to the table."